Seeing Red, page 13
He heaved mightily. Nothing came up but bubbly saliva.
A tiny, hard object shot up from his gullet to click against the obverse of his front teeth. Its ejection eased his trachea open. While he spat and sucked wind, Vivia stepped eagerly forward with a cry of excitement identical to the sounds she made in bed with him.
She picked up the wet black seed and held it between her thumb and forefinger. She tried to gain his attention while he retched. "This is the one I'll keep always, darling. You may not be aware, but amber takes ages to solidify properly."
He struggled to speak, to ask irrational questions, but could only continue what had begun. Another of the wicked little seeds chucked out with enough force to make a painful dent in the roof of his mouth. It bounced off his dry tongue and escaped. He did not feel it hit. It was chased by fifteen more . . . which were pushed forward and out by a torrent of several hundred.
The last thing Steve did was contract to a fetal ball, hugging his rippling stomach. His breath was totally dammed by the floodtide of beaded black shapes that had clogged up his system and now sought the quickest way out.
"I loved you, Steven, and needed you more than anyone ever has. How many people get that in their lifetime?"
Then he could hear nothing beyond the rainstorm patter of the seeds, gushing forth by the thousands as his body caved in and evacuated everything, a full moon's worth. In the end, he was potent beyond his most grotesque sexual aspirations.
Vivia held the first seed of the harvest, and watched. The sight fulfilled her as a female.
ONE FOR THE HORRORS
He recalled a half-column short article that had said Stanley Kubrick post-edited A Clockwork Orange by something like two-and-a-half minutes, mostly to deter jaded MPAA types from slapping it with an X rating, which probably would have murdered the film in 1971. It might have been consigned to art houses for eternity. Inconceivable.
Clay Colvin strolled through the theater waiting room with its yellowing posters of Maitresse and Fellini's 81/2. Wobbly borax tables were laden with graying copies of Film Quarterly and Variety and Take One amid a scatter of the local nouveau undergrounds — which, Clay thought, weren't really undergrounds anymore but "alternative-press publications." More respectable; less daring, less innovative. Victims of progress in the same way this theatre differed from the big, hyperthyroid single-play houses with their $4.50 admissions.
Predictably, the wall was strewn with dog-eared lobby cards, onesheets, and film schedules citing such theme oriented programs as "Utopian Directors," "Oh-Cult," and "Modern Sex Impressionism." The front exit was a high school gym reject that had been painted over a dozen times or so, the color finally settling on a fingerprinty fire-engine red that also marred the tiny box window set into the door's center. Outside, worn stone-and-tile stairs spiraled beneath a pale metal canopy, down to the street and back into the world proper.
Clay's wife of twenty-one years, Marissa, had died on October 17, 1976, about seventeen hours before his promotion to Western Division Sales Manager finally came through. It would have been the upward bump that would embellish their life together. Her reassurances that the position would be awarded to him "sometime soon" were devoted and unflagging; her belief in him was never half-hearted, not even when her hospital bills had become astronomical. Clay dined on soups and kept a stiff upper.
Guilt at her passing was the last thing Clay would allow himself, for Marissa would not have permitted it. What surprised him was the way he settled into a regimen in the next six months: eight-to-five with overtime on each end, mail stop, and then several hours hitherto devoted to the hospital stop. As substitutes, Clay took his work home, sometimes a movie, rarely a bar, a bit of television or phone calls (which amounted to the same thing), or a dollop of reading matter (damned if you can't make fifty pages a night, old man, he chided himself) prior to slumber in a bed realistically too big for a single person the likes of Clay Francis Colvin, Jr.
A birthday and a half later saw more impressive sales rosters and salary hikes for Clay. A bit more hair and vision lost. Unlike Marissa, his checking account had bounced back robustly. His new gold wire-rims were respectably costly. Comparatively frugal since Marissa's death, he splurged on a Mercedes and fought the cliché of a widower faced with the steep side of late middle age. Although he looked a bit rheumy-eyed in the mirror after missing a bit of sleep, he eventually concluded that he had been dealt to fairly.
It had been an unusually productive Wednesday, and upon spotting a Xerox place during his drive home, Clay pulled over to get some documents duped. From his catercorner viewpoint, the block consisted of the Xerox shop, flanked by a pair of health-food restaurants, a hole-in-the-wall ten-speed store, a pizzeria, and a place called Just Another Bijou—it seemed that the business establishments on the periphery of the university district were the only places open after six o'clock. In the Xerox shop, a thumbtacked flyer caught Clay's eye: he scanned a list of features and discovered the theater he had seen was referred to as J.A. Bijou's. The bill for the night highlighted Frederic March in Death Takes a Holiday and Anthony Adverse, the latter Clay knew to feature a neat Korngold score. He knew both films—of course—and the jump from Xerox shop and dull evening to the lobby of J.A. Bijou's was a short, easy one.
Clay enjoyed himself. More importantly, he came back to the theatre, and without his vested business suit.
What there was: theatre darkness and old cinema chairs of varied lineage and age, in wobbly rows, comfortably broken in. Loose floor boltings. The mustiness of old cushions; not offensive, but rather the enticing odor of a library well stocked with worthwhile classics. Double-billed tidbits like Casablanca and The Maltese Falcon together, for once, or the semi-annual Chaplin and Marx orgies. Clay favored Abbott and Costello; J.A. Bijou's obliged him. Homage programs to directors, to stars, and on one occasion to a composer (Bernard Herrmann). Also cartoon fests, reissues, incomprehensible foreign bits and the inevitable oddball sex-art flicks, which Clay avoided. But the oldies he loved and the better recent items ensured his attendance. It was a crime not to plunk down two bucks—or $1.50 before 6:00 P.M.—to escape and enjoy, as Clay had done frequently in the five months between Anthony Adverse and tonight's offering, Kubrick, who had wound up in an art house, censors or no. Clay enjoyed himself—it was all he required of J.A. Bijou's. He never expected that anything would be required of him, nor did he expect to be blown away in quite the fashion everyone was during the following week.
Clay had an affection for Dwight Frye's bit parts, and Fritz of Frankenstein, was one of his best. After Renfield, of course. It was opening night of a week's worth of Horror Classics, and Clay was in enthusiastic attendance. He, like most of the audience, would cop to a bit of overfamiliarization due to the used-car screenings on the tube after midnight.
There were some unadvertised Fleischer Betty Boops and the normal profusion of trailers before the shadow show commenced. Frankenstein had been the Exorcist of its heyday, evoking nausea and fainting and prompting bold warnings onscreen and ominous lobby posters. Many houses in the 1930S offered battle-ready ambulances and cadres of medics with epsoms primed. Then came the obsessed censors, cleavers raised and hair-triggered to hack out nastiness . . . Quite an uproar.
Soon after Colin Clive's historic crescendo of "It's alive!" filtered into J.A. Bijou's dusty green curtains, Clay's eyelids began a reluctant semaphoric flutter. His late hours and his full work load were tolling expertly, and he soon dozed off during the film, snapping back to wakefulness at intervals. His memory filled in the brief gaps in plot as he rollercoastered from the blackness to the screen and back. It was a vaguely pleasing sensation, like accomplishing several tasks at once. Incredibly, he managed to sleep through the din of the torture scene and the Monster's leavetaking from the castle. He was awakened by a child's voice instead of noise and spectacle.
"Will you play with me?"
The voice of the girl—Little Maria—chimed as she addressed the mute, lumbering Karloff. She handed him a daisy, then a bunch, and demonstrated that they floated on the surface of the pond by which they both sat.
"See how mine floats!"
Together the pair toss blooms into the water, and for the first time a smile creases the Monster's face. Having expended all his daisies, he gestures and the girl walks innocently into his embrace. He hefts her by the arms and lofts her high and wide into the water. Her scream is interrupted by sickly bubbling.
Clay was fully awake now, jolted back in his seat by an image that was the essence of horror—the Monster groping confusedly toward the pond as it rippled heavily with death. There was something odd about the scene as well; the entire audience around Clay, veterans all, shifted uneasily. A more familiar tableau would soon have the girl's corpse outraging the stock of villagers, but for now there was only the Monster and the horrible pond, on which the daisies still floated.
The scene shifted to Elizabeth in her wedding gown, and the crowd murmured. It had been a premiere, of sorts.
Clay dreamed, peacefully. He became aware of impending consciousness as per his usual waking-up manner, a rush of images coming faster and faster and why not a pretty girl?
And up he sat. For the first time, he thought of the drowning scene in Frankenstein. Clay shook his head and rolled out of bed into the real world.
Next on the roster was King Kong.
The college kid who vended Clay's ticket that evening after work was gangly and bearded, his forehead mottled as though by a pox. Five years ago, Clay would have dismissed him as a hippie; ten years, a queer. Now hippies did not exist and he regarded the gay community with a detached, laissez-faire attitude. He queued before the cramped snack bar, to provision himself.
He had taken a dim view of the uninspired "remake" of the 1933 RKO Studios Kong— in fact, had avoided an opportunity to see it for free. The chance to relish the original on a big screen again was pleasant; in this Kong, unlike the new one, the only profiteering fame grubbers were the characters in the play.
Clay conjured various other joys of the original while conversing with the lobby smokers: the glass-painted forests, the delightfully anachronistic dinosaurs of Skull Island. He was told that this was not a "butchered" print, that is, not lacking scenes previously excised by some overzealous moralist in a position of petty authority—shots of Kong jawing a squirming man in tight closeup, picking at Fay Wray's garments with the simian equivalent of eroticism, and a shot of Kong dropping a woman several stories to her death were all intact.
This time around, Clay was more palpably disturbed. He clearly recalled reading an article on Kong concerning scenes that had never made it to the screen in the first place—not outtakes, or restorative footage, or Band-Aids over some editor's butchery—and among those were bits that were streaming out of J.A. Bijou's projection booth now.
Carl Denham's film crew was perched precariously atop a log bridge being shaken by an enraged King Kong. One by one, the marooned explorers plummeted, howling, into a crevasse and were set upon greedily by grotesque, truck-sized spiders. It stopped the show, the film's original producer had claimed, over forty-five years ago. It was enough justification to excise the whole scene; no audience had ever seen it, because it would have stopped the show.
It certainly does, thought an astonished Clay as he watched the men crash to the slimy floor of the pit. Those who survived the killing fall were fated to confront the fantastic black horrors; not only giant spiders but shuffling reptiles and chitinous scorpions the size of Bengal tigers. The audience sat, mouths agape.
New wonders of Skull Island manifested themselves: a triceratops with a brood of young, plodding along via stop motion animation, and a bulky horned mammal Clay later looked up in a paleontology text as an Arsinoittherium. Incredible.
"Where did you come across this print?" he questioned the bearded kid, with genuine awe. He was not alone. Fans, buffs, experts had been drilling the staff since the beginning of the week, and the only answer the harried workers could offer against the clamor was that they had nothing to do with it. The films came from the normal distribution houses, the secretaries of which were unable to fathom what the J.A. Bijou employees were babbling about when they phoned long-distance—an expense, just recently affordable. Word of mouth drew crowds faster than Free Booze or Meet Jesus, and the theatre's limited capacity was starting to show the strain of good business. No one else had ever seen these films. In all of history.
And instead of acting then, when he should have, Clay was content to sit, and be submissively amazed by the miracle.
Recently, two 1950s science-fiction flicks had been shunted into a two-and-a-half hour time slot on Sunday-afternoon television. A quick check of a paperback TV-film book revealed their total running time to be one hundred and sixty minutes. The local independent station not only edited the films to accommodate the inadequate time allotment, but shaved further in order to squeeze in another twenty minutes of used-car rock-and-roll pimple-killing free-offer furniture-warehouse Veg-o-Matic madness per feature. Viewers were naturally pissed, but not pissed enough to lift their telephones. The following week boasted the singularly acrobatic feat of Tod Browning's Dracula corking a one-hour gap preceding a "Wild Kingdom" rerun.
Edited for Television always grated Clay's nerves when it intruded in video white across the bottom of his twenty-four inch screen. The J.A. Bijou wonderfulness was a kind of vengeance realized against the growly box; a warm, full-belly feeling. No one seemed to realize that the J.A. Bijou prints were also of first-rate, sterling caliber and clarity, lacking even a single ill-timed splice. They were all too stunned by the new footage. Justifiably.
Clay sat and viewed Fredric March again, but this time as Dr. Jekyll, mutating into the chunky fiend Hyde without the crucial potion for the first time— a scene never released, along with another sequence where Jekyll witnesses the bloody mauling of a songbird by a cat, which serves as the catalyst for another gruesome transformation.
He watched a print of Murnau's premier vampire movie, Nosferatu (not the remake) clearly not from the 1922 pirate negatives—in short, an impossibility. Bram Stoker's widow had recognized Murnau's film as an unabashed plagiarism of her husband's novel Dracula and won the right in court to have all extant prints and negatives of Nosferatu destroyed. The film survived only because film pirates had already hoarded illegal prints, and it was from these less-than-perfect "originals" that all subsequent prints came. Yet what Clay watched was a crystal-sharp, first-generation original, right down to the title cards.
He saw Lou Chancy, Jr., as Lawrence Stewart Talbot, wrestling a cathedral-sized grizzly bear in The Wolf Man. Not the remake. He watched a version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers a full five minutes longer than normal. Not the remake.
He saw Janet Leigh's naked breasts bob wetly as she cowered through her butcher-knife finish in an incarnation of Hitchcock's Psycho a whole reel more complete. He wondered idly when they would get around to grinding out a tacky remake of this classic as well, before he actually thought about it and realized that second-rate producers had been trying and failing for years
The blanket denials by the film outlet that had shipped the entire festival as a package deal were amusing to hear, as related by J.A. Bijou's staff. The most the tinny voices from L.A. would concede was that maybe the films had conic out of the wrong vault somewhere. That other phone calls were being made to them, along with lengthy and excited letters, was undeniable.
This expanding miracle had hefted an unspoken weight from Clay's shoulders. It was overjoy, giddiness, a smattering of cotton-candied jubilation, a reappearance of fun in his life, sheer and undeniable. A shrink would delve so far beyond this simple idea that Clay would become certifiable; so, no shrinks. Accept the fun, the favor.
The "favor" of J.A. Bijou's was, Clay reasoned, repayment to him, personally, for his basic faith in the films—a faith which endured the years, and which he allowed to resurface when given an opportunity. That made sense, though he did not comprehend the why totally, yet. He did toy with the phrasing, concocting impressive verbiage to explain away the phenomenon, but he always looped back around to the simplicity of his love for the films. He was one with the loose, intimate brotherhood that would remain forever unintroduced, but who would engage any handy stranger in a friendly swap of film trivia.
He felt that despite his happiness, the picture was still incomplete. The miracle of the films he was viewing was a kind of given. Given A, B then follows . . . He discussed his idea with other (unintroduced) J.A. Bijou regulars. Had anyone the power to inform him of the turn of events to follow, Clay would have thought them as whacko as his imaginary psychiatrist would have diagnosed him. If he had told anyone. He didn't.
The projection booth of J.A. Bijou's was a cluttered, hot closet tightly housing two gargantuan, floor-mounted thirty-five millimeter projectors with a smaller sixteen-millimeter rig, along with an editing/ winding table and a refugee bar stool. Knickknacks of film equipment were jumbled together on tiers of floor-to-ceiling shelving. Homemade, egg-carton soundproofing coated the interior walls, throwing soft green shadows under a dim work light. The windows were opaqued with paint and the floors were grimy. A large cardboard box squatted to receive refuse film just beneath a rack on which hung the horribly overused Coming Attractions strips that got spliced hundreds of times per month, it seemed.
J.A. Bijou's air-conditioning system was almost as old as the vintage brownstone that housed the theatre. The first time it gave up the ghost was during the mid-Thursday-afternoon showing of Psycho, just as Vera Miles began poking about the infamous Bates mansion. There was a hideous shriek as metal chewed rudely into metal, followed by a sharp spinning that wound down with a broken, wagon-wheel clunk. The audience nearly went through the ceiling, and afterward, everyone laughed about the occurrence, as things were make-shifted back to order.
